NRI: Socially Aware, Expressive, and Personalized Mobile Remote Presence: Co-Robots as Gateways to Access to K-12 In-School Education

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

Participating in the school environment is essential to children's social, emotional, and cognitive development and learning. It has long been recognized that the quality of a student's school experience is important not only for the academic and achievement outcomes, but for fostering self-esteem, self-confidence, and general psychological well-being. Yet annually 26.6% of America's children have health or behavioral challenges that cause them to miss significant amounts of school, and 13% of all US K-12 public school students receive interventions due to learning disabilities or emotional disturbances. This project focuses on the problem of using mobile remote presence co-robots as a means to provide numerous K-12 aged children who cannot be present in school access to the curricular and social learning experiences critical to their development and future outcomes. Using mobile remote presence for access to K-12 classrooms for homebound students may be a powerful gateway for minimizing the effects of physical separation from the school environment. This project develops methods that enable the creation of personalizable robots that allow shared autonomy, socially appropriate movement and socially expressive nonverbal communication in dynamic in-class K-12 environments, allowing children to be truly embodied in the classroom, even from a distance. The impact of this NRI project spans K-12 education at large, but also applies to general uses of mobile remote presence systems outside of the classroom setting, for both education and training. In addition, the project connects the research themes with outreach; it engages K-12 students and teachers in co-robot-themed activities and holds annual NRI-themed workshops at large-scale public venues. The broader outreach program is designed to train students in STEM, so they can become not only end users of robotics and other technologies but capable of developing such technologies themselves, thereby contributing to the US STEM workforce. This proposal focuses on developing control algorithms for mobile remote presence (MRP) co-robot systems that will improve human access to a learning/training environment, focusing on homebound K-12 students, but with general implications to users of all ages and a variety of contexts. Work with MRP systems has identified key missing technical capabilities necessary for facilitating natural remote interaction and learning: 1) simple, socially-appropriate autonomous behavior and context awareness that reduces user cognitive load; 2) expressiveness for conveying the user's affect and communicative intent; and 3) the ability to personalize the way the user interacts through the MRP. This project addresses these challenges with participatory user-informed algorithm development, system integration, and evaluation. Specifically, it first develops an approach to automating and facilitating spatial and social context awareness for the operator and the MRP, and uses it to enable the two research thrusts, social appropriateness and expressiveness, with algorithmic methods for personalizing both. To ground the results in the selected real-world context, iterative design and evaluation is performed in the K-12 in-class setting, involving users across the age and education span, providing a test of the co-robot's relevance, effectiveness, and robustness. The project brings together a pair of interdisciplinary experts with a track record of successful past collaborations and three partners: industry, deployment, and outreach, committed to a project timeline with specific evaluable milestones.